Lucifer's Hammer

Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle's book about the end of the world at the hands of an enormous comet is strangely fascinating. They clearly hail from the Hobbesian perspective of Man (I know, but it's Hobbes' term, not mine) in a state of nature. Of course, getting one's world destroyed in a very scary way probably constitutes a confounding variable, but suffice to say, there's a lot of nasty people in this book.

The second thing that strikes me about this book is the American (specifically, Californian)-centric nature. I'm not calling that an inherently bad thing, because it is a very effective means to constrain the scope of the book which otherwise would be thousands of pages long if written in the same degree of personal detail and addressing the whole world. What I am now curious about is sci-fi takes on the end of the contemporary world from other areas of the world. This book, for example, written in 1977 has as a minor theme the US-USSR Cold War rivalry. I wonder, for example, how would survivors in Africa, or the Andes, or ... wherever would be perceived as carrying on after a catacylismic event.

I just thought about it a bit more, and the device to limit the scope of the book is elegant in its simplicity - tsunami take care of the world's population, because people just seem to love that beachfront view (I know, port cities, trade, it's all economic and logical!); a nuclear war takes care of another large swath of the earth when one country gets jumpy on the trigger finger, and most of the rest of the world (which isn't much) doesn't seem to be all that important except for a few offhand mentions.

I find it hard to read about fictional people reduced to barbarity, and the nasty things they do to one another, especially when the real world has far too many examples of it already. I think the writers used the barbarity to try and make their point (a little crudely) about the strength of the American dream and the power of technology; I can understand the device, but I didn't really enjoy it.

The praise heaped on this book by reviewers (at least the ones plastered over the back and face page of the book) is overly effusive. It's not really that good, in my opinion - I was curious to see how it ended, but at no time did I have trouble putting it down - it's not a "just another couple pages" book. To the book's credit, I now have a literary interest in the cultural study of end-of-the-world stories.